Here’s the “Missing” Evidence for S.D.’s Sex-Selective Abortion Ban

South Dakota recently became the 8th state to make it illegal to abort a fetus because of its sex, and set penalties including jail time and fines for doctors who knowingly provided such abortions. Sex-selective abortion is an phenomenon that has dramatically reshaped the sex balance of several Asian countries, most significantly China and India, where the natural males born per 100 females birth ratio of approximately 105 (it usually never naturally exceeds 106 in large populations) has been distorted to around 120, a breathtaking number indicative of millions of missing baby girls.

Reproductive rights advocates dispute the idea that it is a live issue here in the United States, however. Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress writes,

While female infanticide is an issue in some parts of the world, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Asian American or Pacific Islander (AAPI) individuals who live here in the U.S. are having abortions based on gender. [emphasis added]There is no epidemic of sex-selective abortion among the AAPI community, and passing legislation to “fix” this nonexistent issue simply ends up damaging women of color. Ultimately, these laws scrutinize Asian American women based solely on their race.

Last month, Elizabeth Nolan-Brown at Reason similarly wrote, “Despite having absolutely zero evidence that sex-selective abortions are a problem in South Dakota, state legislators are trying to pass a bill banning such procedures.” Eesha Pandit then penned at RH Reality Check, “Let’s return again to the facts: the purported problem of Asian Americans and sex-selection is not borne out by data,” and “sex-selective abortions are not an actual phenomenon here in the United States.”

Unfortunately (it is truly unfortunate), there is in fact credible evidence that the well-documented “Global War on Baby Girls” includes a small but active front here in the United States.

Sex-selective abortion is widespread in certain countries, especially those in East and South Asia, where an inordinately high social value is placed on having male over female children. There is some evidence—although limited and inconclusive—to suggest that the practice may also occur among Asian communities in the United States. (emphasis added)

The policy review paper acknowledges the evidence, but calls it limited and inconclusive. Yet the two leadingstudies cited by Guttmacher policy review author Sneha Barot, and subsequently most of the authors relying on her paper, are neither especially limited nor inconclusive. Drawing on U.S. Census data and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, study authors Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund of Columbia University open their discussion, “We document son-biased sex ratios at higher parities in a contemporary Western society. We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.”

Now, as the second study‘s author, Jason Abrevaya, explains in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, prenatal sex selection could conceivably be a result of using more advanced reproductive technologies, like IVF or sperm sorting. In practice, the high expense and rarity of such procedures means that almost all prenatal sex selection most likely takes place by abortion. He concludes his study, “This study has offered evidence consistent with gender selection at later births within the United States.” He continues,

The use of an extensive set of control variables in the boy-birth regression analyses rules out any simple biological explanations for the observed irregularities in boy-birth percentages. As such, gender selection stands out as the most logical explanation of the observed irregularities. This conclusion is further supported by the observed timing of the irregularities, concurrent with the increased availability of ultrasound and amniocentesis technologies. The third-birth and fourth-birth trends among Chinese and Indian mothers … match closely with the corresponding trends seen in China and India.

Causal claims are very difficult to make in social science, but these studies, drawing on relatively large samples and a variety of data sources, are very convincing. Contra Culp-Ressler, Pandit, et al., there is significant evidence that sex-selective abortions are taking place in the United States, at the very least in parts of the Asian American community. So far, similar trends have not been found in the U.S. white population, but that does not mean individual white families are not having abortions on the basis of sex. Importantly, the very Asian American communities now showing disfigured sex ratios at birth were well within normal a generation ago.

In their drive to dismiss sex-selective abortion bans as figments of the racist, misogynistic imaginations of pro-life die-hards, these writers have risked lulling their readers into a false sense of complacency about a real and serious source of violence against women here in our own country. What they could be trying to convey, however, is that sex-selective abortion is a relatively limited problem in terms of gross numbers, and not deserving of as much attention as these eight states are giving it.

Abrevaya’s study found evidence consistent with over 2,000 “missing” American girls from 1991 to 2004. According to the FBI, there were approximately 1,214,462 violent crimes in the United States in 2012 alone, including 14,827 murders and 84,376 forcible rapes. Perhaps these writers are trying to say that focusing on a phenomenon so far only found in very small populations in the U.S. is an unwise use of time, and risks perpetuating harm by stigmatizing innocent members of that population. Redden mentions that the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum “has long argued that that sex-selective abortion bans perpetuate negative stereotypes about Asian American women.” Also factoring in, as Pandit explains, ”In the United States, access to reproductive rights has been anchored in the notion of absolute choice. Our political argument is tied to the right to privacy and the belief that a woman’s body is her own and her choice is paramount.”

But what happens when some women turn that choice against their own sex? A commitment to “absolute choice” is ill-equipped to protect girls-to-be-born against the peculiar mix of cultural factors that have produced sex-selective abortion. One reason they should resist the above arguments for dismissing sex-selective abortion concerns is that, even at a very small scale, the fact that this practice is measurably present in the United States at all is very distressing.

As Barot’s Guttmacher report says, “Particularly in India and China, a deep-seated preference for having sons over daughters is due to a variety of factors that continue to make males more socially and economically valuable than females.” Those countries have long-standing institutions that reward having sons and effectively punish having daughters, and the social norms to go along with them. Moreover, China’s draconian one child policy dramatically raises the stakes of each successive pregnancy. One would hope, however, that once in the United States, where women enjoy dramatically higher status and none of those institutional pressures are present, the cultural pressures driving sex-selective abortions would dissipate, or at least fade. Instead, the practice has been rising, and citizenship (one possible measure of assimilation) did not have any significant relationship with the apparent rate of sex-selective abortion in Almond and Edlund’s study.

Many reproductive rights advocates will be rightly concerned by this practice, but resist specific legal bans on the use of abortions for the purpose of sex selection, both because they fear it being a slippery slope to wider abortion bans (as many of the bans’ supporters in turn hope it will be), and because they do not believe legal bans to be particularly effective or enforceable. There is solid evidence to support the latter point. After all, it is not hard for a woman to obtain a sex determination at one facility, and an abortion at another. And China itself criminalized sex-selective abortions in 2005, and banned prenatal sex determination itself in 1989, but its sex ratios have only continued to skew. That said, along with the massive economic growth of China’s past decades, “Between the 1982 census and the 2005 mini-census, China’s reported adult (15 and older) female illiteracy rate dropped from 25 percent to 4 percent, and mean years of schooling for Chinese women rose by nearly 50 percent over roughly that same period, from 5.4 to 8.0.” So while legal prohibition is not by itself not sufficient to curb prenatal sex selection, neither is economic growth, nor female education.

Legal bans on sex-selective abortion should not be abandoned (or opposed) for failing to address the whole issue. The Guttmacher report said that “The most authoritative and instructive roadmap on how to understand and counter the problems of sex selection is a statement released last year by five UN agencies,” which itself reads,

Experience also indicates that broad, integrated and systematic approaches need to be taken if efforts to eliminate son preference are to succeed…[and] to ensure that the social norms and structural issues underlying gender discrimination are addressed. Within this framework, legal action is an important and necessary element but is not sufficient on its own. (emphasis added)

That legal action alone will not be enough to curb sex-selective abortion is something all sides should be able to agree on. AEI demographer and political economist Nicholas Eberstadt explored these limitations in his sweeping 2011 New Atlantis article, “The Global War Against Baby Girls.” Where he concluded, though, was with the one glimmer of hope in the thoroughly depressing sex-selective abortion story: South Korea.

South Korea once had one of the worst sex ratios at birth of any non-Chinese country, hitting 116 in the mid-1990s. Then, in a phenomenon of unclear causation (as Eberstadt says, success has many fathers), their demographic plight began to reverse. The UN attributes the reversal to exploding economic growth, but as we’ve seen with China, that isn’t enough by itself. Instead, Eberstadt writes,

Available evidence, however, seems to suggest that South Korea’s SRB [sex ratio at birth] reversal was influenced less by government policy than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and prizing daughters.

Both sides of the abortion debate can become so consumed with their own positioning in absolutist ideological wars that they overlook genuine opportunities to forge common ground in defending our daughters. Neither “the notion of absolute choice” nor the desire to use this issue as cheap leverage against feminists is equipped to mount the cultural defense these girls require. Both sides, then, face a test of seriousness.

Will they continue to score points among their own true believers? Or will they go out, however uncomfortably, and bend their political strategies to protect the vulnerable?

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Excellent piece, my only feedback here is that Chinese one-child policy can’t really be called “draconian”, not anymore. I don’t know the specifics, but I do know there are exceptions for rural families, and thousands of rural households a year shirk the law and risk paying the fine. Additionally, some women give birth to a second child in a different province to avoid detection. Over time, the law has become a bit more lax in acknowledgement of the government’s inability to track every single household birth. As a result, I think the ratio may have dropped to 110:100, or at the very least, it hasn’t changed.

Excellent piece, my only feedback here is that Chinese one-child policy can’t really be called “draconian”, not anymore.”
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Evidence of forced abortions continues, so I’d call that “draconian” even if a fortunate few slip through the system.

The biased sex ratios come under pressure when as young adults the males cannot find mates. Thus females become more valuable (as in S. Korea). Grandparents want grandchildren (reproductive success) so they put pressure on their children to protect their female grand children. If your boy can’t find a mate all the effort expended on his life is wasted from an evolutionary perspective (grandparents).

@Marjorie, thanks for fleshing out the nuances in China’s “one-child policy.” As Eberstadt mentions, however,

@dstraws, unfortunately the system isn’t quite as self-correcting as a simple supply-demand curve would indicate. Becker and Posner hypothesized that would take place, back around 2000. Instead, the ratios have held steady or worsened, and the greater “value” of women has manifested tragically crudely, by an upsurge in prostitution and kidnapping. With a globalized marketplace, making women a more competitive commodity only increases competition to obtain some

With that in mind, the millions of mate-less men in these countries is getting to be a real geopolitical concern.

While I support the law in principle, it seems that it would be impossible to enforce in practice. There are non-invasive genetic tests available that will tell you the gender of your baby by 10-12 weeks gestation. Unlike older tests (amnio and CVS), they test the mother’s blood, looking for trace amounts of fetal DNA.

“Many reproductive rights advocates will be rightly concerned by this practice, but resist specific legal bans on the use of abortions for the purpose of sex selection, both because they fear it being a slippery slope to wider abortion bans (as many of the bans’ supporters in turn hope it will be), and because they do not believe legal bans to be particularly effective or enforceable.”

This describes my attitude towards legal bans on sex-selective abortion to a T. I could certainly get behind a public service campaign to honor, protect and prize daughters and oppose sex-selective abortion but I worry about its staying power. I saw the success of the safer sex campaigns of the 90′s undone by cuts to public funding and restrictions on content during the aughts. I also remember when GOP pols nationwide were increassing penalties for domestic violence and funding educational and public health campaigns to prevent violence against women, but I haven’t heard much on that front for maybe a decade.

I worry that any grand bargain between the anti-abortion and reproductive rights sides that included a legal ban on sex-selective abortion would end up leaving a law on the books that politically opportunistic or ideologically driven future districts attorney could use to selectively prosecute and lock up “those people” long after the public service ads stopped running and educators on the ground were instructed that they could only get public funding to educate around sex-selective abortion within a curriculum or campaign opposed to abortion in all situations. I could work with the other side on an educational campaign and public service messages but I would proceed very, very cautiously from there.

Is the real point of the bill to force gender-testing of fetuses before abortions, adding increased costs and guilt-shaming (it’s no longer a fetus; the doctor will eventually be required to refer to it as a boy or girl to the woman) to the process?

I hope so, Okie Exile! The more visible the costs of abortion become, the less acceptable it will become. After all, the only reason abortion ever gained acceptance among a substantial portion of our society is because one does not (often, or necessarily) have to hear the baby scream, or see it bleed, as the doctor begins dismemberment.

Women who experience regret for their abortion experience real and legitimate guilt. Better to spare them from it by preventing abortions than to have to forgive them for it later.

I dont understand the political argument because it sounds like the liberal left is trying to have it both ways.

On one hand, they say that an unborn fetus is a non-living, non-viable, non-human parasite living off its mother with no rights.

They also say that a woman has a right to their body without restriction, without rights of the father or husband.

They also say that we should be an open multi-cultural society tolerant of diversity. No culture is superior to another culture. People should have religious freedom.

So when it comes to abortion based on gender selection which is based on religious, cultural and societal beliefs then do they really have the right to have it both ways?

Or is this another argument whereby communities are encouraged by liberals to gather by race, religion, ethnicity, politics, orientation, etc…to elect people of their values/agenda then they use the same communities to say there is a lack of diversity, that such segregation is a sign of descrimination and prejudice.

Or is this an example of say affirmative action for women but where women already have majority status there is no equivalent affirmative action for men. It is simply disregarded because men arent considered a disadvantaged minority even where women are a majority…for example nursing.

The hypocrisy of nearly all the leftist issues of victimization, borders and cultural relativism lead to a incredible amount of hypocrisy.

“On one hand, they say that an unborn fetus is a non-living, non-viable, non-human parasite living off its mother with no rights.”

I think this view is accurate. At its core it doesn’t make any sense. I care not whether a child is a boy or a girl. That child is a human being in development as all humans are and is entitled to live out his or her life.

What it does demonstrate is the wholesale lie touted by democrats about the understanding of human conception. And this understanding indicts them in every way.

Human life starts at conception. When liberals start confessing that truth, maybe I will consider taking them serious about anything else.

@EliteComminc. Human life starts at conception. When liberals start confessing that truth, maybe I will consider taking them serious about anything else.

Confessing? What an odd term.

There are lots of things that constitute human life, btw. Like, say, a 14 year old who jumps a fence and walks across someone’s back yard in the middle of the night. An illegal crossing someone’s ranchland and fleeing if accosted. Or even a thief breaking into a home with intent to steal. And most conservatives I know have little problem with the homeowner summarily dispensing those forms of human life in the name of “property rights”.

It’s clearly a woman’s rights to her own body that conservatives have a problem with.

I see the rearing of daughters in these son preferring cultures as a tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone wants the daughter-in-law but nobody wants to rear the daughter. I guess my approach is fine. Societies that value their daughters so little won’t treat them any better should they actually be born. They’ll likely eat last and won’t get much education, only fit to live in the house as a grand act of tolerance. Once an adult they’ll be married off at the soonest opportunity and then will be bullied by their mother-in-law and husband, then they’ll turn around and rear their children in the same awful way. Such cultures should die.

At the policy level, few if any liberals, progressives, radicals or feminists of any stripe have ever accepted the idea that every facet of every culture is equal and should be allowed; hence the international campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM) and sex trafficking but for reproductive rights and gay civil rights.

Even on the rhetorical level, only the most hardcore cultural nationalists will try to justify FGM, for instance, from any perspective even associated with the left. In France, I am ashamed to admit, most of the left has supported bans on religious apparel and symbols in schools or on public employees, but I don’t see those sentiments gaining traction among liberals or leftists in the U.S. Instead, I see progressives and leftists defending Muslims against FBI sting operations and harassment.

Lukas says: “Or is this another argument whereby communities are encouraged by liberals to gather by race, religion, ethnicity, politics, orientation, etc…to elect people of their values/agenda then they use the same communities to say there is a lack of diversity, that such segregation is a sign of discrimination and prejudice.”

Again, aside from some cultural nationalists like the Nation of Islam or, maybe, the old Republic of New Afrika, I don’t know of anyone on the left side of the American political spectrum who supports ghettoization or self-segregation. Moreover, it was a coalition of Black Democrats and White Republicans in the South back in the 80′s and 90′s that carved up electoral districts to maximize the election of the same. This was criticized at the time by some White Democrats and by the black academic and activist Lani Guinier as shortsighted and likely to result, as it did, in ideologically homogenous districts where, for instance, a conservative white Republican wouldn’t need to give a damn about what their few black constituents or moderate or liberal white constituents thought.

As for sex-selective abortion, I think I am pretty mainstream among supporters of abortion rights when I say that I oppose sex-selective abortion but do not want to see it outlawed (for all of the reasons I listed previously). It is possible to oppose something but not support legal prohibition as the best response (see: the War on Drugs).

A few years back I heard a rumor that there were lesbians who were doing this to abort male children. They not only refused to sleep with the enemy, but refused to give birth to the enemy as well. I was skeptical but did some research. I live near Northampton, MA, the “lesbian capitol of the world”. I looked up the birth statistics for Northampton for the previous 5 years or so. It turned out that more girls were born than boys, a situation that is unlikely without intervention of some sort. I would have liked to have seen the data on couples who were unmarried (this was before we had “gay marriage”) to see if the percentage of female births was even higher among them, but could not get hold of the data.

Again and again, it has been shown that morality outcomes are achieved through civil society, not law. This is one example, but hardly the only example. Quite simply, when you try to enforce your version of morality without getting the general buy-in of society than failure is inevitable. If you look at the past, one prominent failure was Prohibition. More recently, gay marriage is inevitable, because laws like DOMA were passed but only the gay marriage activists were trying to win the minds and hearts of people. And while I expect more short run abortion restrictions, the failure to address the moral issues and other real issues (e.g. social attitudes on adopting your baby) pretty much guarantee that pro-lifers will win battles but lose the war.